The benefits of recycling

Environmental benefits

The recycling industry is making a substantial contribution to the improvement of our environment by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, delivering significant energy and water savings, as well as conserving non-renewable virgin resources.

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) modelling* has shown that by substituting secondary-use materials for virgin materials in 2006-07 the environmental benefits from reprocessing all material recovered would be equivalent to:

• Victoria saving more than 81 million gigajoules of energy
• preventing more than 4.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere (equivalent to taking 690,000 cars off the road)
• saving 46 thousand megalitres of water (enough to fill more than 18,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools)

Economic benefits

Victoria's reprocessing industries contributed more than $73 million to the state's economy during 2006-07 through capital investment and expenditure on research and development (R&D).

Level of capital investment and expenditure on R&D by Victoria's reprocessing industries, Victoria 2006-07

*RMIT University, Centre for Design, Life Cycle Impact Data for Resource Recovery from C&I and C&D Waste in Victoria, September 2005

Top | Last updated 18/07/2008